Product Details

• Actors: Agnes Varda
• Directors: Agnes Varda
• Format: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
• Language: French
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: The Cinema Guild
• DVD Release Date: March 2, 2010
• Run Time: 110 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0030H16W6
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #71,759 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "The Beaches Of Agnes" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Review

[Four Stars!] "A great, loving, uplifting film." --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Product Description

A reflection on art, life and the movies, The Beaches of Agnes is a magnificent film from the great Agnes Varda, director of The Gleaners and I and Cleo from 5 to 7, a richly cinematic self portrait that touches on everything from the feminist movement and the Black Panthers to the films of husband Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and the birth of the French New Wave.

SPECIAL FEATURES
- Mastered from original HD Source Material
- Two shorts by Agnes Varda on the making of the film
- "Le Lion Volatil" (12 minutes), short film by Agnes Varda starring Julie Depardieu
- Biography and Filmography
- Theatrical Trailer
- 5.1 Soundtrack
- 12-Page booklet featuring production notes and essay by film critic Amy Taubin

See all Editorial Reviews

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a beautiful, beautiful film, February 14, 2010

By 

BetsyR (Santa Barbara, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Beaches Of Agnes (DVD)

I saw this doc. at the Santa Barbara Int. Film Festival, for me, it was the best film in the fest -- and it is moving, touching, fascinating, beautiful and more. I hope it wins the Acad. Award. It most surely should, both for the innovative qualities of her story-telling and for the story, Ms. Varda's life. She says she's always been a gleaner -- and that was a wonderful film, The Gleaners and I -- and here she gleans her own life, makes a mosaic of all the bits and pieces, inspiring, I think, the rest of us to do similarly with our own. I look forward to buying the DVD - and I never buy DVDs, but this will be one to look at and look at and look at again.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars close to perfection!, August 31, 2009

By 

Claire McGrath "filmlotus" (pomona, australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

I saw this in brooklyn and was instantly in awe. What an amazing woman but even more -this film is sheer delight and joy. The cinematography and framing are exquisite.It is almost divine! She has a mixture of new and old in the shots, the people and her wonderful voice and commentary. It is funny , poignant and inspiring.
Instantly in my all time top 5 films.
My only criticism...the last 7 -10 minutes are a bit dragged out and tedious.
Claire mcgrath

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Varda's Amazing Autobiography, March 26, 2010

By 

FMB123 (Fairbanks, Alaska) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Beaches Of Agnes (DVD)

Granted, I am a huge fan of Agnès Varda's work--and persona. I've seen most of her American releases, which are, unfortunately, far fewer than the 46 films she's directed.

Eighty-one-year-old Varda is, first and foremost, a poet who happens to be holding a videocamera. And with this, her autobiography, she quickly brings us into the stream of consciousness of her brilliant mind, regaling us with both fantastic images, filmic experiments, and words rendered so quietly and sweetly that it belies their utter veracity. With the fluidity of a Russian ballerina, she weaves still photos, clips from her films, present-day documentary footage, and fictional re-creations.

A viewer with a familiarity of her oeuvre will obviously take away greater understanding and enjoyment of this recounting of her life and work. Yet, I believe it's accessible even for the uninitiated, as a tribute to an artist and iconoclast who sustains a strong vision and keen insight into life and art. And a great big heart.

" `If we opened up people, we'd find landscapes.' If we opened up me, we'd find beaches," she begins, an apt conceit for the half-Greek filmmaker who has lived her life near the sea. And thus, in the film's opening shots, she constructs a web of mirrors propped on easels in the sand, reflecting the incoming waves. These are fancy, gilded, furniture mirrors, large and small, capturing both la plage and Varda's reflection as she begins the narrative of her childhood. In and of itself, it's a beautiful installation piece--greatly enhanced by the reflexive quality of a sea of cameras filming themselves.

Moments later, she sets up family photos on blades of grass in the sand. While discussing an image of herself and her sister in their bathing suits, two little girls appear in current time, wearing the same sorts of suits. "I don't know what it means to re-create a scene like this. Do we relive the moment?" Varda wonders. But her answer seems less about reconstructing the past (this is not a wistful film like Bergman's Wild Strawberries), but more about delight in her powers as a magician with a camera. "For me, it's cinema, it's a game," she says.

Some of the film's sweetest moments derive from shots of her family--her two children and late-husband, fellow New Wave auteur Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). She obviously has great affection for the "peaceful island," as she describes them. In one lovely scene, the extended family is dressed in white gauze, frolicking. "Together they're the sum of my happiness. But I don't know if I know them, or understand them. I just go toward them."

Varda employs an unusual technique of re-creating the major moments of her life/films while bringing her current self into the proceedings. In the age of social networking a la Facebook, with gambits toward entering the past as we simultaneously dwell in the present, this seems a very contemporary notion. With the gift of memory, we both do and don't inhabit all of the times of our life at once. As she states, "I live. And as long as I live, I remember."

One of La Varda's most lovable traits is how utterly herself she can be. Her 8-decade-old hair sports its trademark bowl cut, yet in some scenes is colored almost parfaitlike (sans cerise) with white on top and deep red around the ends--gloriously unconventional, and wry. And indeed her sense of humor is continually present. She also has the good sense not to take herself completely seriously. After revisiting her early home in Brussels and discovering that it is now inhabited by an avid train enthusiast who prattles on about his collection, she concludes, "The `childhood home' part was a flop."

In 55 years of making films, the director has clearly spent ample time pondering the art of her craft. As she notes, "I think I've always lived in it." This is obviously so, and without traditional tutelage. She claims to have made her directorial debut, La Pointe-Courte (1955), after having taken in just 10 films in her first 25 years. This greatly flouted convention within French filmmaking of the time, in which training and credentials were paramount. Much of the film concerns images and the context of their creation-- the process of birthing, what prompts images into being, the results of their existence, the ripple effects of the filmmaker's art, and the inextricable link between maker and film.

Although Varda includes reenactments in this walk backward, she also allows the viewer to be in on their making. It's as if she hopes to underscore the artifice and revels in the fact that we will knowingly suspend our disbelief anyway. In one scene, she sets up a production office atop sand dumped on a city street.

The movie's final scene reveals Varda's "shack," a studio she's recently built on the beach. The filmmaker-as-architect metaphor made real, its walls are constructed of strips of celluloid from a 1966 film in carefully chosen colors, bathed in light. The structure is fragile yet appears solid. This is a wondrous metaphor, one that seems to encapsulate the artist's spirit and life. "In here, it feels like I live in cinema," she notes.

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